


Believe

by downdeepinside



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Loss of Faith, Religion, S3 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 02:38:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2007867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downdeepinside/pseuds/downdeepinside
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of Sherlock Holmes, and God.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Believe

**Author's Note:**

> This is really weird. And hasn't been checked properly. So double apologies.

Italian leather shoes tap smartly on the uneven stone floor, a clever skeletal hand reaching out to brush gently along the polished wooden pews running up the left hand side of the nave, neat rows decorated with simple prayer cushions and aging blue bibles. He walks steadily, gaining on the alter seated in the chancel, before reaching the final row. He taps against the wood of the pew twice, an old (odd) habit, before gracefully sliding down and taking a seat in the empty church. He looks up to the elegant eagle-shaped lectern, the polished silver candlesticks, the horribly uncomfortable benches that seat the choir boys, and a small, sad smile finds its way onto his face without his bidding. Eventually, his eyes fall shut and his head dips down in a way he’d long thought he was incapable of.

His whispers the words, those two words, and when he speak his voice is – for a moment – nothing like the deep caramel baritone he has become used to over the years. His voice is something lighter, higher, almost like a child’s. His eyelids flicker in fear, although of what he is not sure he yet understands, before the words start to tumble off of his tongue as if he hasn’t left it twenty years. As if, really, he is just chatting with an old friend.

Maybe he is.

He whispers for hours, at least it feels that way, and his silent audience watches on. Or maybe they don’t, for all his intelligence he can’t claim to know. At some point he finds his way onto his knees, the cool stone floor causing a dull ache in his aging joints. His hands clasp in front of him out of habit. It’s strange, he’ll suppose later, how still he was in that moment. Quite a contrast to his normal whirlwind of energy.

His murmured biography eventually swirls to a stop, and he finds his neck prickling in unwarranted fear at the thought of moving from this place. He squeezes his palms tightly together, the sweat drenching them causing an almost comic squelching noise, and in that moment he knows it’s time. He pulls air into his lungs, whispers a weak “thank you,” and opens his eyes.

The spell is broken.

He stands up.

***

When Sherlock Holmes returned from the dead, there were many things that had changed. Take Baker Street for instance; the day Sherlock jumped there had been three cafes on Baker Street, one shop dedicated to The Beatles, a small supermarket, and a retired army doctor with an infamous reputation when it came to women. The day Sherlock returned there were two cafes on Baker Street, several green grocers, a polish delicatessen and – notably – a distinct lack of ‘Three Continents Watson’ or his alter ego, ‘The Confirmed Bachelor’.

The point is, things changed. Sherlock himself was no exception.

***

“Do you believe in any of it?”

John’s voice had that odd quality it always gained when he was attempting to extract any sort of personal information from his new flatmate. A sort of strained but still light-hearted tone, that suggested he was willing to switch tracks and act like his serious question wasn’t serious at all – should the need arise. Sherlock thought of it as his ‘got-a-girlfriend-then?’ voice.

“Hmm? Any of what?” Sherlock asked, feigning innocence as he blinked into the glare of his laptop screen as if reading something ruthlessly fascinating.

“You know,” John shifted in his chair, rubbing his elbow with his hand as if that could diffuse the tension, “God, religion, the stars. All of that.”

Sherlock quirked a smile as if John were a terribly endearing child he felt the need to entertain, “I assure you John: the stars are quite real.”

“Don’t be an arse.”

Sherlock shrugged, and flicked to a different tab. John sighed loudly and pushed his chair back, surely with a deliberately unnecessary amount of pomp and circumstance, before turning the kettle on and swinging open the cupboard door. The consulting detective rolled his shoulder and sat up, glancing at his companion quickly before returning to his intense stare-off with the computer.

“I used to.”

John flinched, “What?”

Sherlock swallowed and closed his eyes for a moment. He reached up to shut the laptop and tapped on the lid, twice. “Nothing.” He smiled, to his companion of contradictions.

***

Sherlock’s enforced exile was long, and many bad men were forced to fall where he had not. He didn’t so much play the role of the dead, more the role of death. He would wander from place to place, a gun in his belt, a knife strapped to his leg, and a few deadly pills at the bottom of his pocket that he was secretly saving for himself. Death, destruction, and the occasional solved puzzle would follow him wherever he roamed.

His hand shook the night he took his first victim.

After that, it was as steady as a dead man’s pulse.

***

John giggled as he took another sip of the scotch in his hand, falling back into his arm chair and flashing Sherlock a terrific fifty-watt smile, “This is great!” he exclaimed, probably referring to the alcohol he was holding and not the mess Sherlock had made of the lounge, “We should do this more often!”

Sherlock quirked an eyebrow and took a delicate sniff of his glass, still his first, before taking a tiny sip and scowling as the burning started at the back of his throat. “Best not,” he murmured, letting his head fall back and hit the wall, “Wouldn’t want to follow in your sisters footsteps.”

John fell silent, causing Sherlock to look up slowly and lick his lips as his words registered.

“Sorry,” Sherlock shrugged, evoking an unhappy smile from his companion. The two drank in silence for a further beat before John dropped his glass onto the coffee table, wringing his hands and staring at Sherlock’s knees.

“She’s better now,” he muttered to the floor, “Found Jesus, or something.”

Sherlock laughed, perhaps too loudly, and reached for the bottle of scotch. “Wait till she loses him again.”

***

Drugs were always going to be a weakness for Sherlock, whether it was a sickness or a character flaw or just plain old happenstance. It was only too natural, therefore, that when he found himself back in an empty flat with an empty gun and the eyes of twelve ( _twelve_ ) dead men and one women whom he had once known well, he turned to the drugs to shield him from everything. A temporary barrier went up between him and the rest of the world, and although the next morning he might scream His name in vain as the pain from years ago came flooding back into every atom of his being, any God, or star, or otherwise was absent.

He was alone.

***

This time, it’s Sherlock who’s drunk. His motivation had originally been for a case, to determine how much alcohol would render an extraordinary man incapable of controlling his own actions, but somewhere along the way he’d lost interest and ended up simply trying to see how much alcohol it would take before he burst. Or split in two. One would happen eventually, surely.

The living room light flicked on and Sherlock grinned, allowing the wine bottle in his hand to hit the floor with a gentle _thud_ before looking up to his flatmate through half closed eyes. He opened his mouth to greet the doctor, but his words were interrupted by a loud burp – which in turn was cut off by a childish giggle.

“John,” he greeted, as calmly as he could manage while functioning on three bottles of wine, “I see you,” he staggered to his feet and nearly pitched into the ex-soldier, “You’re home. Yes, home, hello,” he stopped and gripped onto the back of the sofa, smiling, “Hello.”

“Jesus, you’re wasted,” John whistled, picking up discarded mugs and bottles as he made his way through the living area, “What happened here?”

“Looking for Jesus,” Sherlock exclaimed, suddenly inspired, since John’s sister had found Jesus and she drank a lot so, so of course he could be found in a wine bottle. Of course. Didn’t the bible say something about wine being Jesus’ blood anyway?

John frowned, “I think we need to get you some water, mate,”

“No!” Sherlock leapt towards the kitchen, promptly losing his balance and landing on the carpet, “No, I’m fine. This is great! I feel enlightened. We should do this more often. You were right.”

“I was?”

“Yes. You were right. You are, occasionally, you know. Just not often. You make mistakes. That’s okay, I do to.”

John glanced towards the kitchen before shaking his head and sitting down, investing in the conversation, “I know you do,”

“I thought Father Christmas was real until I was eight year old,” Sherlock mumbled, looking almost ashamed of himself.

John chuckled, “Not to mention your blind spot when it comes to the solar system.”

“The sun goes round the earth, it’s boring. No one cares, John.” Sherlock’s eyes fell shut and he curled up against the wall, “I used to be a choir boy, you know,” he wrapped his arms round his knees and scowled, “That was a mistake.”

John squinted at the detective, “A choir boy?”

“Till I was seventeen,” Sherlock nodded, “Attended Church twice a week. Then I went to university, met Sebastian, and cocaine, and. I stopped,” he shrugged, “Figured there can’t be room for a God in this kind of world.”

John watched on in silence, quietly revelling in the opportunity to learn more about the strange man he called his best friend. So, what, if his tactics were a little underhand? Two years is a long time to live with someone you barely know.

“I studied chemistry, which you know. I studied these elements, and how they formed. How everything in the world was formed and how it could all be explained with no need for some higher power. There’s this principle, chaos theory. Its physics, really, but I was never going to be solely interested in chemistry. It’s this theory that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, and that everything about life is completely chaotic and unpredictable until it happens. You see? There’s no way of knowing, no consistency, it’s all just chaos. And there’s no room for something else in that. There can’t be someone controlling chaos. That’s literally the definition of chaos.”

Sherlock’s eyes remained shut, and he sank further down along the wall until he was virtually lying on the floor.

Eventually, John left the man to make a bed on the floor, by himself.

***

John got married, and Sherlock attended the wedding and stood at the front of a perfectly decent hotel room while being incredibly thankful Mary hadn’t chosen a church wedding.

When he left that night, early on, he didn’t find his way to a sterile needle, nor the bottom of a wine glass. Instead he found himself curled up in his arm chair reading an old book, looking for answers he’d long believed weren’t really there.

***

Mary shot Sherlock, and it was agony, and then darkness, and then more agony coupled with John’s hot breath on his face and screaming sirens over his head.

Sherlock’s eyes shot open and he pulled in a horrific breath that crackled and burned like a campfire. John’s hand was immediately squeezing his, the one free of wires and cannulas, and although he probably wasn’t Sherlock felt he was shouting a foreign language at him. The detective tried to tell him to keep it down, but all that came out was a groan before he took stock of the oxygen mask covering his face.

“Sherlock? Sherlock can you hear me?” John sounded worried, and Sherlock had promised he’d never let John sound worried again, so he focused all his energy on the weakest squeeze of his hand ever. John didn’t seem to mind, though, and he rushed out a sigh before forcing a smile and nodding at Sherlock like he was a child who just gotten the correct answer.

“Good, good,” John rushed, still smiling shakily, “You’re going to be fine, alright? Sherlock? You’re going to be absolutely fine.”

Sherlock blinked heavily at John as he felt his mind descending into darkness again, and words from year ago seeped into the treacle of his thoughts.

_Please, God, let me live._

***

As Sherlock boarded a plane heading to his final destination, he rubbed his hands as if trying to wash away the blood of Charles Magnusson. He sat in his chair and closed his eyes in an effort to avoid the stares of all those he’d killed over the past three years, and as the engine span to life beside him he had a thought.

In a world of chaos, of unresolved murders and innocent gunmen, of assassin wives and ex-army doctors, there was most certainly room for God. Because, he supposed, in a world full of impossible things, it made perfect sense there was an impossible thing watching over it all. And, maybe there wasn’t some man on a cloud with control over it all – but that didn’t mean no one was watching. That didn’t mean Sherlock was alone.

When Sherlock was called back to England, he wasn’t surprised; he wasn’t alone, either.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments are really appreciated!


End file.
